Language: January 2008 Archive Page

The Double-Tongued Dictionary cited one of my blog entries as a source for the word "quizzam," which is a word I use to let students know that a scheduled quiz might be harder than they expect.

That blog entry was actually written in iambic pentameter, since I wrote it on my annual "Blog in Blank Verse Day."

Language Log quotes a recent paper:

In the spring of 2004, a number of middle and high school teachers enrolled in a graduate linguistics class for teachers noted that their students at certain city schools were using yo in place of he or she. The authors collected spontaneous occurrences of the pronoun and then designed several writing activities and sentence judgment tasks. The tasks were administered to more than 200 students in two unrelated schools in Baltimore. It was clear from the results that students in these two schools use yo as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, primarily in subject position.

It's always hard for the kids to make the transition to "Daddy is working" when, from their perspective, it looks like I'm just tapping away at my computer, as I often do in my spare time.

When my wife interrupted me to ask me to get something down from a high shelf, I had just learned that I had accidentally deleted the directory that contained the entire database for the Seton Hill weblogs, as well as the last 7 or so years of this weblog.

I knew that my ISP backs up my whole site weekly, and I knew that I had added a nightly backup for those crucial files, but I knew that I'd have to put in a support ticket and I knew I'd lost the work I'd done since the last backup.  I have an RSS feed that sends me all the comments that get entered into any of the blogs, and I can recover any missing new blog entries from the HTML pages generated by the database.  I've been through this before, though not as a result of my own stupidity.

I was a bit cranky, but I got the thing from the shelf. Even though I knew I was poised for a couple of hours of copy-and-paste tedium, as I recreated a course website from the HTML files generated by the database, something penetrated my brain when my wife offered a very nice "thank you."

My wife is of the "I shouldn't-have-to-say-it-because-it-should-be-obvious" school of thought. That generally goes for saying "please" and "I'm sorry," too.

But a few days ago, when the kids were clamoring for attention and she was curled up in bed with the lights off, she said something like, "Your kids are so excited to be able to play with you."

So it seemed, for a moment, that maybe my wife was making a particular effort. I asked her whether maybe she had made a new year's resolution to be extra nice to me.

She had an instant reply. "No, I am not going to spend the year sucking up to you. That's not my idea of a new year's resolution. You can put that in your blog."

Oh, well. It was a nice thought there.